Billy Budd

Leeds Grand Theatre

Tuesday 18th October 2016

Benjamin Britten's testosterone oozing choral opera is set on the high seas aboard a gun ship during the French Wars in the 1790s.

An all male cast of sixty portraying the ship's company is centred on just three pivotal characters - the equivocal Captain Vere, Commander of "HMS Indomitable", John Claggart the Master-at-Arms, and the eponymous Able Seaman Billy Budd. Billy's beauty, innocence and goodness places him on a fatal collision course with the malevolent Claggart.

But all is not quite shipshape with Opera North's new production directed by Orpha Phelan. She has set the action inside a huge decaying grey drawing room - the inside of Vere's mind perhaps.

The elderly Vere meditates in the prologue and epilogue on the consequences of his actions decades earlier.

Leslie Travers' staging with its curved timbered walkways, railings and hammocks vaguely suggest a ship but there is little sense of the sweaty claustrophobic atmosphere below decks. This design concept unfortunately dilutes the dramatic impact of the opera.

The ship's company seemed indisciplined and they were often grouped too far upstage. I have never forgotten the prison-like setting of Opera North's 1992 production which compressed the great ensemble scenes onto a towering structure of catwalks above the stage, from where they made a blistering impact.

Phelan does introduce some authentic touches like the brutal flogging of Oliver Johnston's vulnerable and hauntingly sung Novice, and the boy "powder monkeys" who bring on the gun powder for loading into the cannons.

The consummate singing actor Roderick Williams makes his role debut as Billy Budd. Williams acts with such sincerity and sings with supreme elegance.

The condemned man's plangent aria "Billy in the Darbies" and his praising of "Starry" Vere who has effectively signed Billy's death warrant, are heartbreaking scenes. Alan Oke projects the torment of the terrible dilemma facing Vere.

Oke's pure, clarion tenor is redolent of Peter Pears for whom Britten created the role. Alastair Miles brings a saturnyn authority to the role of Claggart but he fails to project the lust and pure evil so indelibly conveyed in 1992 by John Tomlinson.

Britten's orchestral writing is at its richest and features mournful saxophone, plangent brass and meltingly beautiful harmonies depicting the sea and the veil of mist around the ship.

Conductor Garry Walker at the helm of the magnificent Orchestra and Chorus of Opera North releases both the visceral power of the vocal writing and the intense inner detail of Britten's orchestral score.

Billy Budd is at Leeds Grand on Thurs 27th and Sat 29th Oct.

Geoffrey Mogridge